Feinstein: Holder should have waited

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif..), the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, criticized Attorney General Eric Holder on Sunday for moving ahead with an investigation into harsh CIA interrogation techniques.

“Candidly, I wish the attorney general had waited,” Feinstein said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”. “Every day something kind of dribbles out into the public arena. Very often it has mistakes, very often it’s half a story. I think we need to get the whole story together and tell it in an appropriate way.”

Feinstein said that her committee was in the midst of taking a “total look” at the intelligence agency’s interrogation and detention practices.

“We’re well along in that study,” she said. “And I’m trying to push it along even more quickly.”

Though the she was “horrified” by the findings of the 2004 report by the CIA's Inspector General’s detailing cases of prisoner abuse, the senator said the timing of the Justice Department inquiry was “not very good.”

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz) also expressed his concern with Holder’s decision on the same program, saying that he was worried about the “morale and effectiveness” of the CIA. He said he supported President Barack Obama’s conclusion that “we ought to go forward and not back.”

McCain said that although torture has “harmed our image in the world” and served as a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda, “for us now to go back, I think would be a serious mistake.”